Reevely: The LRT tunnel is (probably) safe for its workers

Workers who fear they’re unsafe in the train tunnel they’re building under downtown have a duty to report their concerns, Ottawa’s transit boss John Manconi said Monday, after another worker was injured on the weekend and union leaders said they’re worried.

A worker in the light-rail tunnel got whacked in the head with a heavy hose on Saturday and went to the hospital. It was the second incident in the tunnel in a week. Last November, workers were trapped and one was slightly hurt when a chunk of rebar came off a tunnel wall. These cases are adding up, as labour leader Sean McKenny said Monday.

Is the tunnel a death trap? Inasmuch as nobody’s been killed in it, no. But the city isn’t great at making its own case that it’s safe.

Manconi was speaking on behalf of the city government and its rail company, Rideau Transit Group, which has the $2.1-billion contract and is the tunnel workers’ more direct employer. Journalists had sought to speak to someone from RTG but, as the contract with the city requires, the company referred everything right back to the city.

So here was Manconi, ambling out of his office at OC Transpo headquarters on St. Laurent Boulevard, jacket off and collar open, to give a small scrum of reporters a dose of his reasonableness and supreme calm.

“Every single employee working in that environment has the same rights that every other employee in Ontario has. They have joint health and safety committees, they have inspections, they have the right to report to the Ministry of Labour, they have a right to refuse unsafe work,” Manconi said.

RTG must keep its job sites safe and workers also must say so if they think something’s wrong, he said.

The rail project is a public-private partnership, a “P3,” in which the city is very proud to have transferred substantially all the risk to Rideau Transit Group. Almost anything that goes wrong, anything that holds the job up, is the builder’s problem. Manconi pointed this out. Including the consequences of the massive Rideau Street sinkhole last year that held completion of the tunnel up for weeks.

“We’re in the space of P3s, right? P3s are complicated things. Time is money. RTG … has penalties at the back end if they don’t meet (deadlines),” Manconi said. “So they have some very smart people, smart engineers, lots of labour resources at their disposal to meet their requirements. So our project, even with the setback at Rideau, is still one of the best ones out there.”

Eight- and 12-hour work days have expanded to 24. Five-day work weeks extended to seven. More work happening in more places at once. If the question had been, “How is the Rideau Street sinkhole affecting the construction timetable?”, that’s a nearly perfect answer. But the question is whether RTG has an incentive to push the limits and the answer is obviously yes.

Nevertheless, there’s a ratio of injuries to hours worked that’s used to assess workplace safety and the rail project scores 0.32 on a scale where lower is better. Ontario’s average for heavy construction is about 1. So the rail project is one-third as dangerous to workers as an average construction job in this province.

This is the figure for the whole multi-year construction effort from Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Road, though, not just for work inside the tunnel. It’s actually even more than that: it counts the work to widen a section of Highway 417 before anything much train-related began. A figure for the tunnel work alone — which would need not just the number of injuries but the number of hours people have worked in there to be calculated — isn’t available.

Manconi had some trouble explaining how the figure is calculated, and also wasn’t sure whether the number of injuries on the project has been 11 or 12. Turns out it’s 12.

By the time he was done, Manconi had said so many times that we’d have to talk to Rideau Transit Group about things that the company had to put somebody up to talk after all.

That turned out to be Tim Stewart, the project’s director of construction, who said the worker hurt on the weekend was conked by a concrete-spraying hose that had itself become embedded in concrete; they used a crane to heave it out and when it came free, it whipped around like a loose garden hose and hit him in the helmet. The worker is off for couple of days until a test confirms he’s not concussed.

(He was initially reported as having been “severely injured,” in a statement from the fire department that paramedics said they’d been told not to comment on. Nobody seems to know where they got the idea to break with their customary habit of releasing basic details about significant calls. Just one of those things that happens with the rail project.)

The sinkhole made RTG rearrange its plans but didn’t create a great deal of extra pressure, Stewart said.

“Work still had to be completed. The quality is still there, the quality is still measured the same way. The production rates that we’re expecting are not different than we had expected earlier in the project,” he said. “We just changed our logic and modified our schedule.”

Besides, safety isn’t just a moral and legal responsibility, he said, it’s good business. “If our workforce is safe, practically speaking, we turn the job over faster.”

No worker on the project has refused to work over safety concerns, he said.

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